Youtube is too good at keeping me watching things on Youtube. I see something interesting and think, “I should probably get back to my homework, but it is only a minute long so it couldn’t hurt.” Then there’s the disembodied voice of a french man saying, “…five hours later,” and my day is gone. It’s the age old problem of just one more distilled to one movement of my hand. I put my hand in the cookie jar, and the cookies are not letting go.

Now, although it is very easy to be sucked into the Sarlack pit that is Youtube, I have been able to keep the distraction it causes to a minimum. Until this week. I’m sure you’ve heard of the social media app Vine. It is basically the definition of snippets of entertainment. I don’t have a Vine, I just missed the boat on it and decided it wasn’t worth the swim to catch up. So, I don’t have Vine but Youtube does! What I mean by that is that there are whole youtube channels dedicated to curating the best of Vine and releasing it in monthly chunks. It’s like crack for your eyeballs, with six second scenes of hilarity that are about as easy to resist as not eating from a bowl of popcorn. I know I’m full, but my hand still has a mind of its own and I just keep putting the stuff in my gob. I watched 2 straight hours of these six second portions of content. That’s 1,200 vines, and there’s still a lot more. I even saw a bunch of Vines with the Property Brother’s in them, the set of twins from HGTV.

The clips are so short, the distraction so concentrated, that you aren’t given time to think. It’s just an onslaught of stimulation that sucks me in. Combine this with my tab problem and it’s a recipe for disaster. I managed to snap out of it this morning, but then I was hungry. I decided that I couldn’t study while I ate, so I put on another video. I followed Alice and her vertical videos down the rabbit hole.

It really makes me wonder whether or not this kind of thing is affecting my ability to concentrate in the real world. If I become accustomed to a type of media that provides near constant stimulation, how can I expect to be able to watch things in long-form? It could even influence my personality, I could become more impatient or in a state of constant boredom from the stimulation fallout.

Vine’s meteoric growth in popularity has changed the lives of those people who have become “Vine famous.” It seems to me that it’s affecting the lives of a lot of it’s users too though. Youtube provides a constant stream of compilations, but the app itself allows you to scroll ad infinitum through the clips. It’s a level of distraction that really could not have existed before the internet. Snapchat, Instagram, and twitter are all culprits as well. Each one has their own form of attraction and validation for their users.

So I’m sitting in my room writing this. At the end of every paragraph I’ve looked at my phone to answer some texts. Then I see I have received a snapchat so I go check that out, and while I’m there I watch all of the snapchat stories of my friends. By then the people I am texting have replied so I text them back again. Hopefully during that time I don’t browse through my tabs, or refreshing my subscription feed on youtube. Vine is my current poison but the internet is really the drug dealer. There are so many benefits to the way that the internet connects people; but this mundane bombardment of distractions, from so many sources, makes focusing my ADD brain, on any task that does not provide instant gratification, a losing battle. The fact that the view counts on these videos ranges from six hundred thousand to in the millions is really a testament to their appeal. I can’t be the only person who gets distracted like this, and I really don’t know a viable solution now that I do all of my homework on a huge internet portal. I have about as much chance as a dyslexic, sixteen year old boy has trying to read the Odyssey in a strip club.

 

Louis C.K. said there are two kinds of people in the world: people who admit they pee in the shower, and f*cking liars. I think there is another way to split people; there are people who close a tab when they’re done with it, and people who always have about fifteen tabs open. I am the latter. I don’t know why I don’t close them, often I’ll hand my laptop to a friend and hear the familiar, “Why the hell do you have so many tabs open dude?” It’s oddly compulsive, I had an ex-girlfriend who would close all of my tabs when she used my laptop and it drove me round the bend. It gets even more bizarre when I realize that I have all of those websites bookmarked to the top of my browser, essentially eliminating the need for keeping any of the tabs open. I literally have a Chrome extension, called TooManyTabs, that lets me save tabs for later so they don’t use up too much of my GPU. I literally found and downloaded an app to save tabs because the number of them was slowing my computer down. I could have just started closing tabs, now instead the app reads twenty-one saved tabs. I’m a tab hoarder, if the internet had it’s own version of TLC I’d be on it.

The problem with this is that every time my eyes wander there’s a tab calling to me. Like a little square friend peeking over a wall and quietly yelling my name. Right now I have three Youtube tabs and a Netflix one at the top of my bar. Why I would need three tabs for Youtube when I’ve already seen the videos in them is beyond me. They are a distraction waiting to pounce whenever I get writer’s block. It’s like I’m a chicken who just kind of likes hanging around near the edge of a forest full of wolves, just because I ate some nice worms there last month. Over the course of this term I’ve really seen a trend emerging; most of my distractions are self-inflicted or easily avoidable. Why don’t I just put my phone on silent when I start my homework? Why don’t I say, “No thanks, I’ll hang out with you guys later,” why don’t I just close the tab that is only open because I couldn’t remember the lyrics to Fluorescent Adolescent? Writing this has been mildly cathartic though, but I don’t know if I feel good because I acknowledged the problem, or just because writing is one more distraction.

It certainly seems the internet is the biggest distraction in history, and perhaps the internet facilitates these compulsions we have; it could even be a healthier alternative. Better to hoard tabs than something physical, right? It seems everyone does it in some fashion; people’s iPods are full of music that they never listen to. People save everything they’ve ever written, or taken a picture of, on their laptops, even though they know they’ll never need to read a Writing 121 essay they wrote freshman year. Although… the internet and the abundance of storage could also exacerbate people’s compulsions. Maybe, instead of my hoarding spreading to my tabs, will it spread to other parts of my life? As our lives become more and more digital, will we start running out of space online too? Will the line begin to blur? Someday there could be no distinction between a digital distraction and a physical one. I make an arbitrary distinction between reading a book as a distraction verses reading an article online. Does the medium of a distraction matter? Is deleting tabs, or never removing unread emails from your inbox, on par with saving every card you ever got, or keeping clothing in your closet that you literally never wear? It really depends on what you personally define as a distraction verses a nuisance or a quirky habit.

I turned 23 this week and, despite the lack of Taylor Swift songs to summarize my experiences, it’s been a good week. Of course, as Murphy’s law dictates, I had a midterm, on Wednesday evening, which cut my plans to have a pint with every meal short.

Surprisingly though, it was not my birthday that distracted me the most. It was a game called Agar. Here’s a link to it, if you wanted to wonder where a few hours of your life just went: http://agar.io/.

The premise of the game is that you are a dot, and you grow bigger by eating other dots, or other players. That’s it. Oh, and there is a leader board. Now, for the life of me I don’t know why I wanted to be on the top of that leader board so badly. That freaking leader board has been the bane of my existence.

I think it’s my ego that is to blame. You see, you can name your little blob. Be warned though, you can literally name it anything, so the game is a minefield of racial slurs, and inflammatory language. That’s another problem, I couldn’t play the game in public for fear that someone would just see me staring at a huge dot on the screen emblazoned with, “NAZI”; them not realizing my own smaller dot was locked in a life or death struggle to get away.

But I digress, I really just wanted to see my name at the top of that leader board. And the longer I played, and the closer I got, the more invested I became. So I retreated to my room and this festering sore of an obsession grew. Of course, I am exaggerating, creative license is a blessing, but I was like a meth addict, and the key to Walter White’s lab was sitting at the top spot.

Most ironic of all, when I eventually consumed the player, “Go Study,” (I’m not joking, that was their name), I took the top spot. And that was it. I just kind of looked around my room at 3 in the morning and decided I should probably go drink some water.

In terms of hours spent, versus pay off, it was kind of like someone in a wheel chair entering a raffle then winning a treadmill. Now that example is extreme but you get the point.

I could of course analyse the game’s dynamics, the greed of it, the need for caution and risk, the parallels with consumerism. But really, it was just a stupid game, and I didn’t really have that much fun playing it, but not every distraction has a purpose. Still though, I wish I could become obsessed with my history homework for once. So I guess if you felt that reading this was a waste of time then that’s a little fitting.

 

So, my room has a smell. Not a nice smell, like scented candles. Not a smell that invokes good memories either though. Cinnamon reminds me of Christmas, if this smell reminded me of anything, it was probably a memory I repressed.

So, I left for Portland last week. I left my room smelling, well it smelled like a dude’s room. When I returned on Sunday, two of my housemates came tumbling out of their respective rooms, asking what the hell I’d left rotting in my room. Confused, I opened my door, and a distinct smell of death smacked me in the face. I turned, and politely asked, “What the fuck did you guys do to my room?”

I turned on my friend Michael, we’d been roommates freshman year, and had lived together since (I’m a senior now). I reminded him that my room had never smelt this badly in 3 years, so either something died in there, or there was something they weren’t telling me.

My two roommates went pale.

It wasn’t from fear though, the smell had just crept out of my room like a decrepit hobo that was rubbing himself on the furniture. I closed my door and we went outside. Luckily the hobo did not follow.

Of course, we did not find the source of the smell, and returned to the crime scene. They wished me luck as I dove into the tangy air that hung in the hellish place. The only thing preventing me from vomiting was the enraged belief that I would find the carcass of a skunk somewhere in my room. My roommates provided moral support by periodically sliding lit scented candles through the briefly cracked door. I took their gagging as words of support.

Every window was thrown open. The room looked as bright as day from the sheer amount of scented candles. But no matter where I looked I could not locate the source. I cleaned that room more spotless than it had probably been in history. But the smell remained, as if a giant fish had stolen Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak and was circling me. The smell was so thick I wouldn’t have been surprised if the candles had gone out from lack of oxygen.

Needless to say, sleeping was difficult. I arranged the candles around my bed to try and create a barrier of smell. It looked like I’d planned a romantic evening, right beside the dump.

My windows have not been closed all week. And I’ve taken to doing my homework in the garden. The smell, has luckily abated by now. Who know’s what caused it, or why it went away. Maybe something ate whatever was causing it.

So, that was a novel distraction. Usually my nose distracts me when something delicious is in the vicinity. I can’t complain too much though, at least my room is clean.

 

My current relationship with distractions are that they terrify me. I spend so much time procrastinating that I refuse to commit to anything.

“Do you want to go to [stereotypical college activity] next monday?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Yeah maybe. It’s my out just incase I procrastinate all week and really can’t come. And they accept that answer, because more often than not I go anyway because by the end of the weekend I welcome the distraction.

The hardest part is taking the first step. I find this applies to everything I do. I put my foot forward, and how long it takes to land really depends on how long I can suspend my real life. Youtube, reddit, Netflix, all hold me in limbo. I’m waiting for the penny to drop; but when my head is in the clouds it’s a long drop, and who knows if I’ll even hear it when it lands.

My foot has dropped though, and the penny with it. The fat lady is waiting in the wings.

It is assumption that is the real culprit. Yeah maybe is an admittance that I might procrastinate. It’s the expectation that my consumption of inconsequential drivel is going to stop me from getting anything done. Assumption is a self fulfilling prophecy. So now I assume that I will get my work done.

Whether I do is up to me.

It seems that distractions follow us wherever we go, like ravens after the scent of carrion. They circle us constantly, cawing and fleetingly throwing our faces into shade. For many though, distractions are a welcome sight. In the blistering heat people might call for a huge flock of ravens to circle them, and vultures too, anything to protect them from the sun’s piercing rays.

This is my relationship with distractions. They are a friend I haven’t seen in years, who happens to visit when I have the least time to spend.

“Conor, come to the pub, we have to catch up it’s been forever!”

I of course oblige grudgingly, and for the first half an hour my stomach twists as I think of everything I have to do. This is the trap though, the more anxious I become the less I want to think about my obligations, the more I welcome the shade. I soon find myself engrossed in the nostalgia of conversations with an old friend. The second pint comes with a relief, I’m committed to the distractions now, the ravens have chased away my nagging worries. The nagging scent of carrion fades as the raves feed, and soon my friend isn’t a distraction at all. I am enjoying myself, and the occasional whiffs of responsibility are unwanted.

In a sense my life is nothing but distractions. Whatever I am  doing, there is always something else calling for me. If it’s not the cawing of the crows, it’s the heat of the sun. The universe is like a needy child shouting, “Conor! Look at what I can do!”

Distraction is the fence that keeps me from progressing, but it also protects me from awareness. “Ignorance is bliss,” it’s the catchphrase of distraction. Sometimes though, productivity is my distraction, and this is when the clarity comes. If I just keep up this momentum then nothing can stop me, my goals whiz by me as I pass on after another. Then there is the swoop or a raven, and the whisper and weight of responsibility begins to weigh me down.

Whether the cycle begins anew is up to me.